REVISITING GILEAD AND THE HANDMAIDS

By Ruth A. Sheets

Recently, I read a good, but disturbing piece by Joyce Vance who operates a thread on Substack.  She is a legal expert and was looking at the way our courts and state legislatures are working to take away women’s rights, first to abortion, then to birth control, then to . . ..  There is no honest reason women should be losing our rights now that there are safe medical practices that can make life far less dangerous for women regarding reproduction.  The problem, the white men who are the majority in the legislatures and on the courts moving to limit women’s rights seem to have a need to demonstrate their power and women are their victims, particularly poor white women and women of color.

Vance presents Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book “The Handmaid’s Tale” as the dystopia that does not seem as far off as it did nearly 40 years ago.  In the story, a virus is making many women infertile, so those women who can give birth are prisoners of the state and auctioned off to the guys in charge as fetus incubators for their infertile wives.  They are called “handmaids,” men pretending they are serving the Lord as well as their masters. It is an appalling system in which women are enslaved and older women are employed to discipline the handmaids if they try to escape or refuse their masters’ rapes.  In short, the men demand and command and the women carry out the orders and don’t care who suffers, not too different from the way many women were treated in Nazi Germany.

Revisiting "The Handmaid's Tale" made me really angry all over again.  When I read the book back in the 1980s, I was angry that men thought using and abusing women for their own fake religious purposes was OK.  Now, my anger is different.  It says, "Women are the majority in this nation yet we keep letting certain men rule our lives, determine our reproduction, commit violence against us almost at will, and insult, belittle, and harass us nearly everywhere.  It is just wrong! 

As short as a century ago, many women died in pregnancy and childbirth as did their children.  Some medical advancements had been made from Medieval times but not as many as one might think.  Male doctors had taken over the pregnancy care and the birthing process for women instead of the midwives who had done the work previously and the guys often were just not as caring or competent.  There was basic birth control, but women were not permitted to use it in most places, even though it would have saved a lot of lives.  Those who had access to it were often saved from a pregnancy that could have killed them.  Unfortunately, a mentally disturbed man had gotten power he didn’t deserve back in the 1870s and forced through laws that criminalized sending information about birth control through the mail.  He didn’t like sending pornography through the mail either and of course had to carefully check it out before deciding whether something was porn or not.  His name, Anthony Comstock.  Somehow, he got to run the US Post Office and became its dictator.  He had no experience that should have qualified him for the position, but clearly his weird warped religious ideas were sufficient in the 19^th century for the job.

Right now, there are a cadre of white male Republicans with their female surrogates trying to revive the 1873 Comstock Act, originally forced through to control people’s lives according to Comstock’s sick religious standards.  It is still on the books!  Men in power just couldn’t let it go when attempts were made over time to drop it.  Now that abortion, in their view, is on the way to being banned, Republicans need another issue to target.  They landed on birth control; they want to ban it too.  Those rich white men want women to be pregnant whenever men choose to donate sperm, forced or otherwise and women should have no say, a lot like the handmaids in Atwood’s book.

The reality is, as the majority in America, women should have more say than the minority rich, white men and their female sycophants who are making and reviving these archaic laws.  Why do we women and our non-female allies permit them to deny us health care because they claim their warped religious and/or gender beliefs don't like it?  Why has our president not sent the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to be certified since all the states needed for ratification have been collected and placing a time limit on its passage is not in our Constitution?  That could nullify some of their sex-related banning efforts.

As we can see as one right is taken away the takers’ sights are on the next one.  Those folks have a lot of power, and are evil, calling embryos and fetuses children with the same rights as the woman who “houses” them.  We need to act very soon to avoid becoming further victims of conservative Republican white male frustration.  Those guys have money and power; we have numbers.  That should be more powerful, but we women are not used to having and using power.  We usually go along to get along as a survival mechanism.  Well, that needs to change if we are to avoid entering Gilead.

To get things going right now, we women need a national underground network to procure the “morning after pill” and abortion medication and distribute it to every community and every woman who might need or want it.  When the network is set, sympathetic doctors, trained midwives, nurses, and other medical personnel who are willing to take risks and work in reproductive health must be recruited and funding sources must be located.  These health caregivers must be practicing in settings all over the country, be well-trained in dealing with abortions after 11 weeks, pregnancy complications, and 3^rd trimester abortions if the fetus or mother is at risk.  They will also need expertise in the many forms of birth control.  There will need to be a chain of hidden clinics for providing such care in red states where legislators want to drive women back to the dark ages of dangerous pregnancies and forced birth.  The clinics could even look like the fake pregnancy centers but actually provide real care.  This could be similar to the Janes of Chicago who provided abortions for thousands of women when abortion was illegal in the late 1960s.  Some “clinics” at the beginning could be set up right across the border in next-door states that still believe in freedom, and on public lands and military bases.   In addition, airlines and railroads could be recruited covertly to, at very low cost, transport women to abortion/pregnancy centers.  Traveling with a uterus should never be a crime. 

There is an effort in some of the warped red states to essentially make women prisoners once they become pregnant, using apps to monitor girls/women’s menstrual cycles and communications so they can’t leave the state and can be imprisoned if they have an abortion or even a miscarriage.  Tech savvy women need to carefully and secretly sabotage any network that tries to gather incriminating information.  Warnings to women not to use online services to track their periods would be a good first step.  Abortion providers in states where abortion is legal must not keep records with names of out-of-state patients in case the Supreme Court should rule that like with the fugitive slave law of the 1850s, all states will have to provide abortion information for fugitives from the states where abortion is illegal.  Alas, this is definitely possible with the right-wing ideologues/misogynists on the SC now.

Women and allies should consider researching and boycotting businesses of any legislators, their families, and people known to donate to candidates and organizations that stand against women’s right to choose.  When asked, they can say, “Oh, I don’t do business with folks who don’t respect women’s personhood.” 

To get things rolling, we need a national "Lysistrata” event.”   Lysistrata was a Greek character and heroine in a play by Aristophanes.  She got all the women of the city to stop sleeping with their husbands and other men until they stopped the war they were fighting.  It worked!  This time, it would involve women and men not having sex with anyone opposed to women’s right to decide about her own reproduction.  It could start out with a well-publicized 3-day trial run, then resume at least until the ERA is certified, and some movement is made to drop anti-abortion laws in the red states where abortion is currently illegal.   

To help things along, Doctors, except in cases of real emergency, should quietly refuse to treat the legislators who voted to ban abortion and birth control, and the judges who permitted such anti-femaleactions, and their family members (with no explanation, of course).  They could go to other countries for care just as they expect women to go to other states when they have taken away women's rights to medical care.  They’re rich and could afford it, but it would be inconvenient.

We could try to fix this by an act of Congress like dumping the time limit on the ERA which was unconstitutional to begin with, but those white male legislators, can’t do it.  After all, they will have to find another way to curb women’s advancement; that’s too much work for them. 

So, it's time we women and our non-female allies (and there are a lot of us), the majority in America, stand up and finally say "No, we're not going to take it anymore!" We must act before the Gilead male minority have undermined all avenues women have to live a life of choice, relegated to being their handmaids. Voting for Republicans, male or female is dangerous for women, pregnant or not, and we need to get that message out as often as possible before November.